Do S.F.’s ‘bait bikes’ stop thieves or entrap poor?

San Francisco police have begun catching bike thieves by baiting them with bicycles under surveillance. (Courtesy S.F. Police Department.)

San Francisco police are getting high praise for their “bait bikes” — the GPS-tracked bicycles they’ve been laying out across the city to lure thieves, who are then pounced upon.

The New York Times this week picked up on the story and posted a video about the crackdown. (At one point, surveillance footage shows a thief being tackled in the act.) Twitter has since lit up with glowing remarks about the program, presumably from the many who have had their bikes stolen in San Francisco.

One of the threads circulating on Twitter offers a counter-argument to the program: that bait bikes unfairly seduce people into crime, namely the city’s poor. Furthermore, argues an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, the program exacerbates the same class divide embodied by Google buses and Mission gentrification.

“In a city in which inequality is greatly increasing, in which those outside the tech industry are struggling to pay rents and deal with increasing cost of life, and in which flushed, moneyed tech employees are buying more and more expensive bikes (the article notes, can cost $10,000), those police are luring people to steal them by intentionally using bait bikes so expensive that the people tempted to steal them can be charged with felonies,” writes Zeynep Tufekci in a blog post.

This feels good but isn't. SF police use GPS-tagged "bait bikes" that are expensive so thieves get a felony charge. http://t.co/p6po3CnY34

Tufekci is not the first to challenge the idea of bait bikes. After Philadelphia launched a similar program last year, critics emerged.

“These kinds of programs —- which come dangerously close to entrapment (in spirit, if not in law) —- are exponentially more likely to net simple opportunists than serial bike thieves,” wrote @cmoraff at Philadelphia magazine.

But the San Francisco Police Department, which reports that bike theft has increased 70 percent in the past five years and now results in $4.6 million worth of losses annually, believes the program is anything but inequitable. It’s catching serial thieves who scout out nice bikes and break through locks, police say.

Officials responded directly on Twitter to the recent criticism.

@zeynep these bikes are all locked thieves cut these locks with bolt cutters or other devices.